I’m slowly, slowly honing in on this whole gardening project how-to-grow-food thing. It’s been four years since I started. I’m slow like that.

The first year was when I was pregnant with my first baby. We joked that the only things I could grow were peppers because I was pregnant with a boy. Get it? Peppers, but no melons. Maybe that is a bad joke. I also couldn’t grow squash or many tomatoes or much of anything, really.

But now, I’m kind of getting the hang of it and realizing things that better gardeners already know. Growing things to be bigger than my thumb is still a challenge, enough that I have completely abandoned trying to grow large tomatoes. But I’m getting pretty good at cherry tomatoes. Small peppers are still my forte. I made jalapeno jam last year just to use some of them up. I am always on the look out for ways to use hot peppers.

Next year, I think I’m going to devote half of the summer garden to cherry tomatoes, maybe 6-8 plants. The other half will probably be peppers and maybe some flowers. This year was the first time I added flowers and I like the way they are just pretty. In the fall, I’m planning to try a lot of leaf-lettuces and maybe radishes for the first time. I am determined that I can cook radishes in a way that I will like. This is not what happened with swiss chard, but I’m willing to give it a shot.